Encouragement for a Mother’s Heart: When Facing Trials

There is a hard lesson that I think God is trying to teach me. It has everything to do with trials and hardships and what on earth is going on when bad things happen in life. Why does a good God let things like sickness or natural disasters or terrorism or all of the horrible stuff we face in this world happen? Why didn’t Adam Lanza get hit by a garbage truck or something on his way to Sandy Hook that day. Or why didn’t the FBI get some fabulous tip that would have stopped that crazy couple from shooting up a work holiday party a few weeks back? What is the point of sickness? Why do we have things like cancer? This week the cancer thing has been out of control! I’ve stopped counting how many celebrities succumb to it in the last several days. It was getting ridiculous.

Why are their so many bad things in our world? I believe God is a good and loving God so why? Why does it all have to be this way? We are His children and it breaks His heart to see us so broken. So why allow us to be broken? You know what? I’m sitting here typing these words without good answers to these questions. I’ll tell you this though, I know it wasn’t God’s original plan. This world wasn’t meant to be this way. Not at all. Then Adam and Eve were deceived and ate that darn forbidden fruit! I sometimes imagine going back to that moment smacking that fruit right out of her hands! UGH!

How different the world would be! Violence, hatred, disease, heartache, all of it would just not exist! None of this tells us why God allows any of it. I think it is because He uses it for our own good. I know, it sounds ridiculous. How can loosing a loved one to terrorism be for our own good? God uses those moments, those heart wrenching I’d rather be dead than living moments, the long slogs through illness, the devastation of natural disasters to refine us. To literally bring us to our knees so that we can learn that we need HIM. We cannot face this broken world without him. We cannot traverse tragedy alone. We need Him! Without tragedy we cruise through life believing we’ve got it all figured out and we are just fine managing without any help. Without tragedy we may never come to know God, we may never accept that Jesus died on the cross for our sins. We may never make it into Heaven.

I think there is one more piece to this puzzle. A piece that is nearly impossible for us to understand in this world. Our time here on earth is FLEETING compared to our time in Heaven (or Hell) which will last for all eternity. 60/70/80 years here on earth isn’t even a BLINK of an eye compared to eternity. What ever we are facing right now, that thing that feels endless, like there is no hope, like it’ll never get better. When viewed in the scope of eternity it is actually shorter than the snap of your fingers.

Then, if you believe in Jesus as your savior your eternity will be spent in a world without any of the terrible things we have in this world. In Heaven there is no war, terrorism, natural disasters, or illness. It is a world filled with everything we wish we had and it does not contain one thing we wish we did NOT have here.

God has asked just one thing of us. No matter who we are, not matter what we’ve done, no matter what our lives have looked like there is just one thing to do. To love Him. To believe with our whole heart that Jesus is our savior. And when that holds true for you your life will reflect it.

God is faithful and he loves those who love Him. Once again what I write to you is really to myself to remind me of the goodness of God and to encourage myself in the week ahead. Have a great week everyone!